Piracy and Empire

By John Feffer, Foreign Policy in Focus. Posted April 27, 2009.

Nevertheless, there are some useful parallels between then and now. For instance, the founding fathers were quick to identify their Barbary opponents as pirates and slavers. But the British viewed the raids conducted by John Paul Jones during the Revolutionary War to be little more than piracy. Piracy, like terrorism, is in the eye of the beholder. As for slaving, the United States in those days was the center of the slave trade. The hypocrisy of complaining of the Barbary states' treatment of a couple hundred U.S. sailors — when American slavers had brought over hundreds of thousands of African slaves — was lost on most commentators of the time (with the notable exception of Benjamin Franklin).

A more pertinent parallel can be found in the military sphere. In the late 18th century, the United States lacked a military that could go head to head with European powers, much less the Barbary fleet. Many founding fathers considered a standing navy to be a threat to liberty. It was expensive and, with the Revolutionary War over, there was no compelling reason to waste money on building warships. James Madison recommended that the United States, in an early version of Homeland Security, focus on the defense of the coast line. In 1794, however, Congress rejected the arguments of both Madison and Jefferson to pass legislation, which President Washington signed, for the building of six frigates. Proponents of the bill used the Barbary pirates as an explicit justification for this sharp increase in military spending, but no doubt the British and French fleets were also in the back of their minds.

There was, however, an interesting clause in the bill: "if a peace shall take place between the United States and the Regency of Algiers, that no further proceedings be had under this act." After the United States did indeed sign such a treaty with Algiers, Washington invoked this clause in 1796 to reduce the naval outlays. But even then, when the military-industrial complex was at its historic nadir, there were concerns of unemployment in the defense sector. So, in a compromise, the early republic went ahead with the construction of three ships.

The war that eventually ensued between the United States and first Tripoli and then Algiers established many of the founding myths of U.S. military prowess (the exploits of Stephen Decatur), new types of warfare (secret military missions), and the linkage of overseas intervention with commerce. In other words, the neoconservatives of the 21st century had some readymade mythology on which to build. All they needed to do was link the Barbary pirates with al-Qaeda. This required turning the agents of secular governments with narrow economic aims into Muslim terrorists with the broadest ideological goals. In this way, a U.S. war on Islamic terrorism could acquire the distinction of a longstanding national interest.

Piracy and Globalization

When the United States declared the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, a mere eight years after the end of the Algerine War, it had the desire but not the capacity to keep its European rivals out of the Caribbean and Latin America. It was the wars against the Barbary states — and certainly not the disastrous War of 1812 — that had given the United States confidence to challenge the European empires. These early conflicts provided the United States with the rhetoric and the vision of a commercial empire when America was but a mere backwater.

The notion that the United States could stay out of wars and messy complications of European imperial politics died during the Barbary conflicts. U.S. economic growth depended on free trade, and U.S. battleships were needed to keep open the shipping lines. When Thomas Friedman wrote of the importance of McDonnell Douglas for the security of McDonald's restaurants — the iron fist of the military behind the invisible hand of the market — he inherited this tradition of imperial logic. It's also the spirit that animated Bill Clinton's geoeconomic vision of maintaining U.S. economic power through the maintenance of U.S. military power, which I have called in another context "gunboat globalization."

With Barack Obama's presidency, some revived version of the Clintonian approach is at hand. Exit all talk of empire, in which adversaries are decisively defeated, and enter the art of hegemony, in which U.S. allies and adversaries are persuaded to see the confluence of their interests and U.S. interests. Obama remains committed to a huge military — he's redeploying troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, increasing the size of the military by 92,000 troops, and staying "on the offense, from Djibouti to Kandahar" — even as he promises to use his persuasive skills with the leaders of Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela. Obama has pledged to roll back some of the most offensive aspects of the Global War on Terror (Guantánamo detention center, torture) but the larger frame will continue under the AfPak designation. Meanwhile, the new president will focus on expanding U.S. global economic power as part of a bid to revive the moribund U.S. economy.

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John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus.

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